


City of Refuge

by ariadnes_string



Category: True Detective
Genre: M/M, Post-Series, Synesthesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-19
Packaged: 2018-03-02 04:12:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2799119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariadnes_string/pseuds/ariadnes_string
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rust tells himself they’re memories, though they come with the force of hallucinations.  What it feels like is being unstuck in time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	City of Refuge

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Zee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zee/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, Zee--I hope you enjoy this!
> 
> thanks to tb for looking it over.
> 
> Title from the song in the epigraph, which plays in 1x01

_Old Nicodemus didn't understand_  
_How could a man be born when he was so old_  
“You Better Run (to the City of Refuge)," Dr. CJ Johnson  
copyright <http://elyrics.net>

_Marty: You still see things ever?_  
_Rust: It never stops, not really. What happened to my head, it's not something that gets better._  
True Detective, 1x08 

__

__Rust wakes flailing, right fist driving, left fist following, until his gut spasms in pain._ _

__Then hard fingers close around his right wrist and he opens his eyes to Marty’s face._ _

__“Hey,” Marty says, “What is it?”_ _

__“No.” Rust croaks, hollow as a toad to his own ears, “When is it?”_ _

__“Fucking painkillers,” Marty tells him, which isn’t an answer, but that’s okay, because Rust figures it out as soon as he hears the bed creak under Marty’s weight._ _

__Marty’s wearing a pair of boxers and nothing else. The smell of a hard day’s sweat pushes against his deodorant, and his body is that of an athletic man reluctantly gone to seed. His belly slopes under his shoulders, and light from the bedside lamp glints off his forehead where hair once was. But if Rust squints, he can see the lines of Marty’s younger body, squared-off and fierce, moving under this aging skin like shadows. He reaches up the hand Marty isn’t holding to catch them._ _

__Marty bats Rust’s hand away. “It’s one-forty-seven in the goddamn morning,” he says, deliberately not answering the real question. “Go the fuck to sleep.”_ _

____

+

They’re fishing, the boat a friend of Marty’s. The shoreline furls away from them, flat and endless, a green so deep it hurts Rust’s teeth like candy.

Marty’s fishing, he should say. Rust is sketching. It gives him a kind of pleasure to strip the riotous landscape down to clean, gray, lines. 

“It’s good to get out,” Marty says.

Rust grunts.

Marty casts his line again, and clears his throat. “I’ve been thinking,” he says, eyes on his float. “Maybe I oughta take you back in. Get you, uh, assessed. I mean your body’s healing okay, far as I can see, but your mind. Shit like last night. That ain’t right. Maybe they can give you something for it.”

Rust waits before he responds. Quells the urge to laugh. Fucking Marty, after all they’ve been through, still a dog clinging to the bone of normality.

“Nah,” he says finally. “It ain’t like that. It’s just what’s been with me a long time. That neural damage I told you about? Chemical flashbacks. Nothing the docs can do they ain’t tried before.” 

“Flashbacks, huh?” Marty asks, like that’s a term he can hang onto. He darts a look at Rust with a tiny worried smile. “Mainlining the secret truth of the universe again?”

“Something like that.”

Marty puts his hand on Rust’s knee and squeezes. Rust stares at it for a moment, registering the familiarity of the touch.

Then a bird grabs his attention, startling out of the reeds. A heron, maybe, but with wings impossibly broad. Rust wonders whether he should try to include its giant shadow in his sketch.

+

Rust tells himself they’re memories, though they come with the force of hallucinations. What it feels like is being unstuck in time.

+

Watching his father fry bacon in their Alaskan trailer, the faded colors of his plaid shirt, the smell of grease, and the wan light of early winter.

The baby-shampoo damp of his little girl after her bath, the firm warmth of her limbs as he towels her dry.

“You’re crying again,” Marty says, passing him a handkerchief with a disgust Rust knows is mostly for show. “Thought you were done with that shit.”

+

Marty’s quiet in the car, after Rust extracts him from the unholy mess with Maggie at the hospital. Rust doles out details of his lead on Ledoux like breadcrumbs in the forest. He wants to spill the whole thing in a rush, he’s that jazzed, but he also wants Marty to stay calm. It seems to work, though Rust can’t tell if that’s because Marty’s paying good attention or none at all.

He brings Marty to his place because, Christ, what else is he supposed to do with him? Besides, they have work to do.

It’s a mistake.

Marty staggers into the apartment, the smell of stale booze trailing behind him like a jangling chord. He runs a hand along the wall for support, and Rust could swear he sees streaks of dirt following his fingertips.

Rust moves to pour Marty a drink from the bottle on the counter. Another bad idea. Before he can even fill the glass, Marty’s on him.

“The fuck,” Marty says, so close he’s jostling Rust’s elbow, his breath its own kind of assault. “You come between a man and his wife like that? What the fuck, man?” 

The proximity is pure aggression, but Rust resists the urge to get a hand on the back of Marty’s neck and slam his face into the counter. Instead, he shifts to get himself enough space to pour the whiskey and slows his voice before he says, “Back off, Marty; it ain’t me you’re mad at.”

“The fuck it ain’t.” 

The sliver of space disappears. Rust can feel Marty’s breath now, as well as smell it. He actually has to squeeze his eyes shut for a moment against the chaos of sensation. Marty crowds him closer against the counter, and Rust would laugh at how primitive the whole thing is, if he weren’t so suddenly and completely wound up. “I’m not going to fight you drunk,” he wants to say, but the words stall in his throat.

It’s a bad night, but Rust would be lying if he didn’t admit Marty gets to him like this on a regular basis.

He could twist his hips and shoulders now, he knows, get an arm around Marty’s throat and hold him there ‘til the fight drained out of him, then leave him gasping on the floor.

He doesn’t. The action is clear in Rust’s mind, but he doesn’t do it. Just pauses there, feeling the weight of Marty’s body leaning into him. They’re frozen in the searchlights, he thinks, caught in the act of crossing some invisible border.

Marty’s breathing changes rhythm.

When Rust does move his hips, it’s because Marty’s grabbed them, and when he opens his mouth, it’s to let Marty’s tongue inside. Because Rust is good at holding back, but sometimes Marty is a flying tackle, a bullet down the chamber of a gun.

The kiss is hard and messy, almost painful, but the force of it is a kind of relief, lighting up the numb places in Rust’s bones. He digs his fingers into Marty’s ass, his turn to tug them closer, lining them up ‘til it’s perfect, a perfect fit. He closes his eyes, allowing himself, for once, to succumb to desire. 

But when he opens them again, the scene has changed. He’s lying next to Marty on an unmade bed. Their bodies are older, naked, a sad record of overuse and misdeeds. A half-healed wound mars the flesh over Marty’s collar bone, a bruise spreading from it like a penumbra.

“Did I do that?” Rust asks. His hand skims along Marty’s side and cups his shoulder.

Marty curls his lips so they’re bitter and smiling at the same time. “Well, I guess, yeah, in a manner of speaking. If I hadn’t ever listened to you, I wouldn’t of—“ But he must see something on Rust’s face, because he sobers. “No, Errol Childress did that. But he’s gone now.”

Marty lifts himself enough to lean over Rust and kiss him, soft, as gentle as when he first heard about Rust’s daughter. But this time, when Rust closes his eyes, he sees bruises moving across Marty’s torso like moths.

+

To be honest, though, the things that have already happened are nothing compared to the things that never will.

+

He’s spread-eagled on a bare bed-frame, tied down. Flies buzz in the heat. His own stench roils his stomach. He knows, more certainly than he’s ever known anything, that he’s always been there and always will be.

“Just like old man Childress,” Marty says, after he’s managed to convince Rust that his arms and legs are free.

“What?”

“That’s what that freak did to his grandfather. I go back there, too, sometimes.”

“I never saw it.”

“I probably told you about it, then.”

“Maybe,” says Rust. The putrid smell still films his nostrils.

+

He’s painting Maggie. Her hair is longer and grayer than it used to be, her body thinned and stretched by age. Her bare limbs are pale, but the room around her glows with color so saturated his mouth waters.

“Aren’t you finished yet?” she complains. “I’m too old to stay still for this long.”

“Soon, baby, soon,” he says, trying to mix the perfect yellow for the curtains behind her. “Goddamn but you’re beautiful.”

“Sap,” she says, just as Marty’s voice floats through the half-open door. 

“Get a move on, you two. The girls will be here for dinner any minute.”

Rust stalks out of the house without speaking after he sees that future. Just a bunch of randomly firing neurons. Nothing Marty needs to know about.

+

Anyway, sometimes the present—if that’s what you want to call it—is overwhelming enough on its own.

+

“When did we start doing this?” Rust asks.

His limbs are tangled up in Marty’s, and Marty’s got his face buried in Rust’s neck. Rust almost hates to ask, because whatever Marty’s doing with his hands, and tongue, and dick feels really good. But he’s been wondering for a while now.

It takes Marty a moment to register the words, but when he does, he pulls away fast, retreats to the far side of the bed, face screwed up in suspicion. “Uh-uh. No way. You telling me now you don’t remember? Like I’m taking advantage of an amnesiac or something? Taking advantage of the neurally-damaged? You kidding me?”

“Fine time to start having scruples, Marty.” It’s mean, but Rust finds he resents Marty taking his warmth away. “Come on back here.”

But Marty just glares at him with patented obstinacy.

“It’s not that I don’t remember,” says Rust. “It's just that I just haven’t gotten there yet. Besides, most of me knows what it’s doing.” He gestures to the areas in question, and gets a tiny snort from Marty. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?” 

“Are you for real?” Marty glares some more, but Rust know everyone will tell their story if you wait long enough. 

“Why’d you take me home?” he coaxes. “Couldn’t have been my perky tits.”

Marty snorts again, a little more humor in it this time. “Where else you gonna go? Besides,” he says, sheepish and defiant, “I thought maybe I’d gotten good at one more thing, late in life: keeping your sorry ass alive. More fool me.” 

“And then?”

“Well, you were weak as a snake-bit dog at the beginning—couldn’t even piss straight, without me helping you. Just about wore me out. After a while, I got so sick of getting up and down in the night, I took to sleeping in here, with you. Wasn’t like you were noticing anything, anyway.” 

Marty’s flushed a deep red now. Clearly this part—the part where he took care of Rust like a baby—embarrasses him more than all the rest of it put together. The color should make him look foolish, but Rust finds it lends him a kind of dignity.

“Anyway, there we were. And then one night. I woke up and you were—well, I was sure it was a mistake—you were dreaming, or hallucinating, or whatever. But as far as I could tell, you were awake.”

“Like this?” There’s still a length of sheet between them, but Rust stretches one leg across and slips a foot between Marty’s calves, nestling his toes there.

“You remember?” 

“Mmm.” Rust doesn’t, not with his head. But his body seems think it does. He lets it call the shots.

“Yeah,” Marty says, as Rust closes the distance and twines their legs together. “That’s what happened. Not that we did much, that first time. Didn’t want to pop your stitches. Didn’t know what I was doing, either. But—ah,” he breathes out hard as Rust curls a hand around his dick, “guess we started to get the hang of it soon enough.”

They chase their orgasms in each others' bodies. It’s not easy and it’s not fast, what with their recent injuries and the long years of tobacco, booze, and living rough. Not to mention the invisible scars of lost loves. Like making love in a field of ghosts, Rust thinks. Or maybe making love _with_ a ghost, since he’s pretty sure that by rights both he and Marty should be dead. Neither the thought nor the effort sours the experience, though. Makes it sweeter, in the end—each moment of pleasure hard-won from the maw of pain. 

Still, they’re both sweat-slick and gasping by the end. Rust’s breath wheezes in his ears. “You call that keeping me alive, asshole?” he says, trying and failing to maneuver his head back onto the pillow.

Marty flips him a feeble bird.

They lie still and pant some more. Finally, Marty heaves himself onto one elbow and peers at Rust. 

“You staying put?” he asks. “Not slip-sliding away on me again?”

Rust sees the spiral arm of time stretch out before him. He turns his back on it. “Nah,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere.”


End file.
